I spent the weekend stepping over bodies – both real and virtual – at the Hack Arizona event in Tucson. As part of the Microsoft sponsorship team, we flew down (bringing the rain with us, you’re welcome) and gave demos, talks and prizes to the hard-working sleep-deprived hackers who were spending 36 hours bringing their…

Happy Holidays! Way back in Part 1, we looked at how to set up a Windows 10 UWP app that would use MonoGame to draw some sprites on the screen. If you are wondering how to move things around the screen in a non-XAML kind of way, MonoGame is perhaps one of the simplest ways…

Here’s how to set up a development environment to write HoloLens apps, even if you don’t have a HoloLens. You will need a PC running the latest Windows 10, a game controller and a copy of Unity. The free Personal edition of Unity, will work fine. It won’t do any harm to have Visual Studio installed…

Updated: Added a few more If you’re moving between a Mac system and a Windows 10 system, you might find you’ll need to reconfigure your muscle memory a little. Here’s a handy summary if you need help. You also might find a useful shortcut you haven’t used before.. Keyboard shortcuts Trackpad shortcuts Note: On a…

If you’ve been writing iOS or Android games and apps, you might have glanced at Windows and though “Hmm, well, Windows is all C# and XAML, so unless my game is ‘Database Simulator V’ that’s not going to be much fun”. And you might have a point: it’s true XAML isn’t suited to apps like…

Who doesn’t love writing games? Only people who don’t know it, IMHO. I was recently working on a simple sprite-based game to run on iOS (for reasons which should become clear at some point), and was having fun creating classes for aliens, explosions and lasers. Eventually I had the laser class working fine, blowing up flying…

Some stats after two weeks of riding around on my new Zero electric motorcycle: Miles: 160 Cost to recharge: Less than a Starbucks latte Number of times I tried to grab a clutch lever that wasn’t there: 1 Number of times I got into the lift at work and pressed “1” expecting it to take…

We’re all nerds here, right? Yeah, thought so. So what do nerds like doing? Being early adopters, right? And if you’re a nerd that also like riding motorcycles (I’ve finally started to say that instead of the more UK-centric ‘motorbikes’), then you pretty much have no choice but to get an electric bike from Zero, right? I’ve…

If you watched the Build keynote this year, you would have seen a lot of emphasis on the Windows 10 features that focus on a more personal aspect of computing. This can sound kinda vague, but it boils down to making software which is easier to use, more intuitive and just plain smarter. After all, we’ve now got…